By Diana Lichtenstein || Onion Dip Columnist
To those who enjoy Halloween, read no further.
Covid-19 has sadly taken many things away, but one thing that is not upsetting me is that it has canceled Halloween. I usually am not fond of the day, so I am optimistic this year because I know it won’t be a big deal. Finally, after all these years, I can relax. No plans to be made, no costumes to choose, no explanations of why I don’t like dressing up. This is a cynical view, I know, but I am not a miserable person. I like every other holiday, except New Year’s Eve (I will cover that closer to the day). I’m not mad that this year with the pandemic, Halloween will no longer take the front stage.
Every year, right when October hits, people are already putting up pumpkins, fake spider webs, and all kinds of “spooky” Halloween decorations in front of their houses. This aggravates me. Halloween is one of my least favorite holidays. I have a couple of reasons for this unpopular opinion. One is simply my troubled history with the holiday. Though it might have had the potential to be one of my favorite holidays, my luck has been too bad on this dreaded day for too many years.
One bad memory that comes to mind is the dark Halloween of 2006. I bought a gourd (the pumpkin-like fruit) just around the 30th. This gourd was longer and skinnier than a usual one, so clearly, it was the perfect weapon to bother my sister with. Naturally, I chased her around our apartment, until suddenly, my body crashed through my glass living room door. The glass as well as the broken gourd fell on the floor beside me. My mom was so angry; and our door stayed broken far too long.
I wish I was kidding, but the following year’s Halloween, I angered my mom once again. We were heading somewhere in a taxi and she had given me one small duty: hold her work camera because she was carrying the groceries. This should have been an easy task, but alas, it was not. Long story short, I left the very expensive camera in the cab, and suffice to say, I did not get much candy that night.
I figured as I got older, I would enjoy the holiday with my increased independence, but unfortunately I’ve been proven otherwise. With each year I grew older, and the days grew colder, it wasn’t cool to look silly or scary on Halloween anymore. I like dressing up cute in regular clothes, but just as Diana, not as something or someone else. I know I may be coming off as a buzzkill, but I wish dressing up as yourself was more normal. If you are going to dress up but do not want to appear “basic,” you have to be pretty creative. I’m still jealous of a girl I know that was smart enough to wear a Netflix shirt carrying a bag of ice with her to be “Netflix and Chill.”
So this year, why can’t we normalize putting in minimal effort for Halloween? Personally, I’ve had enough scary stuff these past couple months to last me for the rest of my life.
Junior Diana Lichtenstein is Onion-Dip Columnist for TCR. Her email is dlichten@fandm.edu.